IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) is a bimonthly journal that publishes archival research results focusing on foundations, methodologies, and mechanisms that support the achievement—through design, modeling, and evaluation—of systems and networks that are dependable and secure to the desired degree without compromising performance. Read the full scope of TDSC

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From the January-February 2018 issue

Off-The-Shelf (OTS) software components are the cornerstone of modern systems, including safety-critical ones. However, the dependability of OTS components is uncertain due to the lack of source code, design artifacts and test cases, since only their binary code is supplied. Fault injection in components’ binary code is a solution to understand the risks posed by buggy OTS components. In this paper, we consider the problem of the accurate mutation of binary code for fault injection purposes. Fault injection emulates bugs in high-level programming constructs (assignments, expressions, function calls, ...) by mutating their translation in binary code. However, the semantic gap between the source code and its binary translation often leads to inaccurate mutations. We propose Faultprog, a systematic approach for testing the accuracy of binary mutation tools. Faultprog automatically generates synthetic programs using a stochastic grammar, and mutates both their binary code with the tool under test, and their source code as reference for comparisons. Moreover, we present a case study on a commercial binary mutation tool, where Faultprog was adopted to identify code patterns and compiler optimizations that affect its mutation accuracy.

Editorials and Announcements

Announcements

We are pleased to announce that Jaideep Vaidya, the RBS Dean’s Research Professor of Computer Information Systems in the Management Science and Information Systems Department at Rutgers University, has been selected as the new Editor-in-Chief of TDSC starting in 2018.

TDSC now offers authors access to Code Ocean. Code Ocean is a cloud-based executable research platform that allows authors to share their algorithms in an effort to make the world’s scientific code more open and reproducible. Learn more or sign up for free.